Psychologists

Jacques Lacan

French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (1901-1981) who reread Freud through structural linguistics and philosophy under the slogan 'return to Freud'. From the 1936 mirror stage to the late seminars on the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, he proposed that the unconscious is structured like a language and that human desire is the desire of the Other. Across more than two decades of seminars in Paris he reshaped psychoanalytic theory and influenced literary criticism, film studies, feminist theory and continental philosophy. His variable-length sessions led to his 1963 expulsion from the International Psychoanalytical Association, and critics from Sokal and Bricmont onward have attacked his use of mathematical formalisms.

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